]]>For the third time in a year, Google has a new leader for its social network, Google+. And in keeping with the trend of trios, Google+ is getting split into three different products: Streams, Photos and Hangouts. Google VP Bradley Horowitz is taking the reins of the former two products, which until now have been part of Google+.

Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.

While I personally find the Google+ network engaging, it has come under criticism by many for being a “ghost town,” so Horowitz has his work cut out for him with the Streams product. Photos is actually a bright spot, in my view: Google has integrated it well into both Apple iOS and Google Android software, complete with an automatic photo backup service.

]]>Google is looking to further untangle parts of Google+: The company may separate Photos and Hangouts from Google+, according to statements made by Google’s product czar Sundar Pichai in an interview with Forbes Thursday.

“Increasingly you’ll see us focus on communications [Hangouts], photos and the Google+ stream as three important areas, rather than being thought of as one area,” said Pichai. That’s notably different from Google‘s previous approach: Former Google+ head Vic Gundotra tried to use photos as a way to grow Google+ as a whole, and Hangouts also used to be closely integrated with Google+.

Google+ has always been a bit of a mixed bag for Google. The social network has provided the company with an identity layer across its products, which has arguably helped to improve YouTube and other platforms.

However, the Google+ stream hasn’t exactly been a huge success, something Pichai had to admit in the interview. “We would definitely like to see more scale at what we do,” he said, but added that Google+ has attracted “a passionate community of users,” and that the Google+ team is working on “a few next generation ideas” to bring more users into the fold.

]]>One of the best things about the web is that it has meant an explosion of choices when it comes to media, especially recently — with the rise of BuzzFeed, the launch of sites like Vox and Fusion, and blog networks like Gawker. And of course we still have all the old places too, like the New York Times and Washington Post and The Atlantic. If anything, we have too many places publishing great content for anyone to keep up.

And that brings up a related problem, which Purdue University doctoral student Frederik De Boer wrote about in a recent blog post. In a nutshell, De Boer said that his problem with many of the new-media sites that have popped up over the past year, such as Fusion — which was launched recently by the Fusion network, a cable channel co-owned by Disney/ABC and Univision that caters to millennials — is that they share a certain sameness of content.

“It just isn’t about anything in the way that the site’s founders and editorial people clearly want it to be. You can write a manifesto, and you can have some sort of goofy TV channel side-piece going on, and you’re still another site publishing people writing about news and politics and culture and sometimes sports. And in that, you’re joining every other website that publishes about news and politics and culture and sometimes sports.”

A striking sameness

De Boer goes on to talk about other sites such as Slate and The Atlantic, the revamped New York Times magazine, the New Republic, Vox and several others, and his point (at least as I understand it) is that each of these sites is producing something very similar to its competitors — the names may be different, and each site has something or someone that might stand out from time to time, but for the most part they are each covering the news in politics, culture and sometimes sports in a very similar way.

Some of De Boer’s specific criticisms feel a bit like a drive-by-shooting: the New Republic, for example, consists of “the same stuff, written by every non-white male [new editor] Gabriel Snyder could find to exorcise the vengeful presence of Marty Peretz’s farting ghost,” while Vox has “a new-fangled invention called the card-stack — an innovative approach which allows webpages to link to other pages.” The Awl is described as “a lot of the same stuff, brought to you by the emotion sadness.”

Those sarcastic descriptions aside, however, I think De Boer makes a good point, which is summed up in the title of his post: “Unless your site is about one thing, it’s about everything.” If your site doesn’t have a unique focus, or a theme or defining vision when it comes to what you cover and when, then you are going to look like everyone else. And that’s not a good thing.

“I no longer know what a website means as an identity, unless that identity is a specific subject. I know what Guns and Ammo is. I know what Road and Track is. (I know what Redtube is.) I don’t know what Fusion is.”

That’s not to say everything is mass-oriented, of course. Sites like Search Engine Land and Skift are aimed at a niche market, and while they may not get as much publicity, they are arguably better businesses in many ways. Other sites such as The Information — which charges $400 a year — are clearly aimed at niche readers as well. But most of the attention in the media sphere seems to go towards the sites with the really big numbers, like BuzzFeed or Gawker.

A drive for revenue

It’s ironic in many ways, but there’s an ongoing tension within the online media industry: Even though the web allows individual writers or groups of writers to target very specific audiences and be successful doing so — as the tech blogger Ben Thompson has been able to do with his site Stratechery, for example — there is still a huge amount of pressure (both perceived and actual) for sites to be as broad as the mass media they have replaced.

Much of that pressure comes from an advertising-driven revenue model, which is driven by the need for large numbers, of pageviews or unique visitors, etc. My friend Josh Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab is right that some of this comes from the fact that BuzzFeed and Vox are VC-funded and therefore need scale. But on top of that, there is internal pressure for a broad or large audience, because it makes those who are writing and publishing feel as though their work has more value. Says De Boer:

“These places run good writing. I’m not disputing that. I’m just saying that they are always launched with fanfare about what makes them different, but I’m not sure that you can ever maintain that kind of vision as an actually-existing publisher unless your site has a very specific, subject matter-based focus.”

The risk is that because you can write about anything, you feel like you should write about everything. But to the extent that your content feels as though it could have appeared at any one of a dozen different sites, that’s bad — it makes it dramatically less likely that anyone will a) remember your site or b) deliberately choose to go back there.

With more and more people finding content through social networks and sharing, there’s already a declining likelihood that they will remember where a specific piece of news or commentary came from. Do you really need to make it even harder by writing about all the same things every other site is, or presenting them in the same way? That just leaves you chasing the drive-by, click-through audience, and that has to be the worst business in the world.

]]>Everywhere you look, a social platform of some kind is either looking to become a publisher or has already done so, whether it’s by hiring writers and editors, as Medium has, or by encouraging media companies to allow their content to live on its platform, as both Snapchat and Facebook do. While other platforms get most of the publicity, however, there is one player on the field that seems to be consistently underestimated as a competitor, and that’s LinkedIn.

Maybe it’s because the site is somewhat ugly to look at and often difficult to use, or because the bulk of the activity that tends to occur there is purely utilitarian — people looking for jobs, people reviewing candidates for jobs, professional networking and so on — but the site’s appeal and potential power as a publishing platform is often overlooked.

That might be a mistake: As Ad Age magazine noted earlier this week, LinkedIn has been hiring journalists from places like Fortune (where executive editor Dan Roth used to work before he joined the company) and the Wall Street Journal to create, edit and manage content. Those who just joined include former Fortune reporter Caroline Fairchild, former WSJ social-media editor Maya Pope-Chappell, and Indian journalist Ramya Venugopal.

From platform to publisher

This marks another step in the site’s evolution from just a static place where people put their curriculum vitae to a content destination. The first step was the launch of LinkedIn Today several years ago, a daily news offering much like the email newsletter round-ups that many traditional media entities put out. Then LinkedIn bought the news-recommendation service Pulse so it could make better recommendations for users.

After that came the LinkedIn Influencer program in 2013, which attracted celebrities like Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson by offering them a platform to express themselves. Medium has taken much the same approach, and recently convinced the White House to post both President Obama’s budget and his State of the Union address there. And like Medium, LinkedIn eventually opened its platform to everyone.

As the Ad Age piece points out, these kinds of efforts make LinkedIn look a lot more like a competitor for existing media companies than a partner — and a competitor that is doing better at the business that those media entities used to think they owned, which is advertising: last year, LinkedIn sold almost half a billion dollars in ads, which is more than all but the top tier of media companies.

Content is a sideline

Much like Facebook, what LinkedIn offers to publishers and to individual writers — and to brands who advertise on the platform as well — is reach: in Facebook’s case, it’s the ability to target and reach huge numbers of users who are in the right demographic. In LinkedIn’s case, it’s the ability to reach large numbers of readers or users who are interested in professional topics, business-related issues, etc. It’s like a collection of trade magazines, where the content is curated by people who work in those fields.

I spoke to a woman recently who was uncomfortable about using Facebook and Twitter, and said that LinkedIn was the social network or platform where she spent the most time, and got the most value. For her, the fact that the site was boring and professional — which some users see as a negative — was actually a good thing, because she could catch up on links or content that were of value to her a lot faster.

At a time when business publications like Forbes are becoming like platforms in an attempt to monetize their audience, and in some cases straying a lot closer to the grey areas of sponsored content and native advertising than many would like, it seems natural that platforms like LinkedIn would try to become more like business publications. And the thing that makes them a fearsome competitor is that content is a sideline business for them — even if it doesn’t work, they still have a pretty good business they can fall back on. Their traditional media competitors, however, are fighting for their lives.

]]>Craig Silverman, the author of a book about journalism and fact-checking called Regret The Error and a column by the same name at the Poynter Institute, has come out with a major report on the problem of online hoaxes and misinformation, a study he did for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. It is an impressive survey of how the desire for pageviews and online “engagement” compels many online media outlets to distribute fake news.

In the pre-amble to his report, Craig (who I should note is a friend) points out that while we usually expect news organizations to disseminate “quality, accurate information” about the world around us, many media companies — and not just digital upstarts but traditional ones — persist in distributing questionable information, even when they suspect it is false:

“News websites dedicate far more time and resources to propagating questionable and often false claims than they do working to verify and/or debunk viral content and online rumors. Rather than acting as a source of accurate information, online media frequently promote misinformation in an attempt to drive traffic and social engagement.”

A human need to share

Recent examples of hoaxes are legion, and many of them have been debunked on a site that Craig started called Emergent.info — an attempt to create a kind of crowdsourced verification engine that can latch onto hoaxes and determine quickly whether they are true or not. From snow on the pyramids in Egypt to a woman who allegedly had three breasts, every month or so seems to spawn a fresh batch of questionable news reports, many of which show up on some of the leading news websites such as CNN and even Reuters.

As Craig notes in his report (which I encourage you to read if you care about this topic), hoaxes and rumors are not new to journalism — there have been outlets that specialize in that for as long as there have been newspapers, whether it’s the British tabloids or the National Enquirer. But a combination of factors have led to the explosion of misinformation we see all around us, including the rise of the social web and the 24-hour news cycle. Silverman uses the example of the disappearance of Malaysian flight 370:

“The drive to fill the empty space with something — particularly on cable news — was partly human nature, and also partly dependent on the need to meet the public’s insatiable demand for information. All of us — journalists and the public — sought to understand what had happened. But facts were sparse. So we engaged in collective sensemaking and rumor propagation to fill the void.”

Fake news goes viral

In effect, we are all CNN now: Every website that wants to attract an audience, no matter how large or how small, feels the overwhelming pressure to be first with a news report — regardless of how questionable it might be. And the more salacious or titillating that report is, the more likely an editor is to hit the publish button, and to hide his or her doubts behind a question-mark headline or the phrase “reports say.” And then many of those sites will double down on this strategy by running stories about how their initial reports were false.

Occasionally, the tension between wanting to be first with a report that people might click on and wanting to be accurate bursts out into the open. In his report, Silverman mentions a discussion in 2013 between Gawker founder Nick Denton and one of his then-writers, viral specialist Neetzan Zimmerman — who at the time was responsible for posts that drove tens of millions of unique visitors to the site, by reporting on whatever was going viral on dozens of social networks. At one point, Zimmerman says:

“Most viral content demands from its audience a certain suspension of disbelief. The fact is that viral content warehouses like BuzzFeed trade in unverifiable schmaltz exactly because that is the kind of content that goes viral. People don’t look to these stories for hard facts and shoe-leather reporting. They look to them for fleeting instances of joy or comfort. That is the part they play in the Internet news hole.”

Who cares if it’s true?

As part of his report, Silverman talks about the psychology behind why we all participate in distributing hoaxes and rumors and questionable information — and we definitely all do it, even journalists. I freely confess that I have retweeted news stories or headlines or reports that I haven’t verified, even though I am regularly humiliated for doing so. Usually it’s because I am in a hurry, and the report seems so interesting that I don’t bother to check.

In many cases, we re-publish and distribute these reports because on some level we want them to be true. We want to believe that a woman who posed for a photo in Iraq with a rifle is single-handedly leading a battalion against the forces of ISIS. Why? Because it would make a great story. And that’s why the single best advice for journalists — or anyone else, for that matter — when it comes to news is “If it seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t.”

This photo shows a female fighter known as the Angel of Kobane, who allegedly killed hundreds of ISIS soldiers

In other cases, however — and I would argue that this is a much larger problem than media companies redistributing false information — the vast majority of people simply don’t care whether a report is true or not. They are going to share it anyway, because it is funny, or touching, or creepy, or disturbing. In other words, it sparks some kind of human emotion. Fusion writer and former Reuters columnist Felix Salmon described this well in a piece he wrote in 2013:

“The reasons that people share basically have nothing to do with whether or not the thing being shared is true. If your company was built from day one to produce stuff which people want to share, then that will always end up including certain things which aren’t true.”

The lines have blurred

This is the one big issue with attempts at crowdsourced verification, whether it’s Emergent.info or Facebook’s recent announcement that it is trying to crack down on hoaxes that get spread via the social network: Facebook’s attempt in particular relies on people to click a button and flag something as a potential hoax — but most people are never going to do this, not just because it takes effort on their part, but because they probably don’t even care whether the report is true or not. They will share it anyway.

In the old days, when media came to us via certain distinct channels — a newspaper, a TV network — it was easy to distinguish fact from entertainment, or gossip from truth. Certain outlets could be trusted, and others couldn’t. But now, the media we consume comes at us from all directions, and the original source isn’t always obvious. And factual news content blurs into entertainment content until everything looks the same.

In effect, we are all trying to figure out whom to trust and when, and the barriers between us and the sausage-making process known as journalism have been removed. That means it’s not just up to media organizations to fix this problem — although they definitely play a major role — it’s up to all of us as news consumers.

]]>All it takes is the retirement of one blogger — namely, Andrew Sullivan, founder of The Daily Dish and long-time thorn in the side of the liberal blogosphere — and the social web explodes with a mixture of praise, recriminations, eulogies for the death of blogging as we know it, and righteous indignation about whether he was one of the first or not. I don’t think Andrew’s departure is the end of the world, but I confess that it did make me stop and think about the nature of blogging, and where it has gone, or is going.

One of the reasons it made me think is that Andrew (who I consider a friend) said he decided to stop blogging in part because the pace of publishing multiple items a day had worn him down after 15 years, and he was getting too old for such things. As I looked through his bio, it suddenly occurred to me that I am a year older than he is, although I have only been blogging regularly for about 10 years or so (I had a website that I posted links to before that, but didn’t think of it as a blog). But enough with the self pity!

Blogging as business

The other thing that got me thinking was the wide variety of reactions to Andrew’s decision: some said it was about time, since he had become a parody of himself, while others said they would miss his willingness to debate. Some said blogging as we know it died a long time ago, when blogs started to become businesses (as Gigaom and many of its contemporaries such as TechCrunch and Read/Write Web did). But others said that the spirit of blogging lives on, through people like blog pioneers Dave Winer, and Jason Kottke, and Andy Baio.

BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith is one of those who argues that blogging is gone forever, a case he advanced in a long (blog) post in which he described his own adoption of the medium as a way to rise up through the media ranks as a reporter, using early political bloggers like Josh Marshall (who hasn’t retired, but continues to run Talking Points Memo) and Sullivan as his assignment editors, pursuing stories that they were interested in. But in the mid-2000s, he says, things had already started to fall apart:

“First, Josh Marshall made a rational decision that destroyed these silent assignments and ultimately undercut, in a way, the influence that he and the others wielded. He started building his own aggregation, and then reporting operations, linking first to their own back page, capturing the audience, and sending a trickle rather than a flood of traffic.”

In other words, Ben is saying that some bloggers stopped thinking as much about being part of a larger ecosystem — one in which they linked to and sent traffic to other bloggers, and in turn relied on their resources and links — and started thinking about becoming their own independent media entities instead. In effect, they turned inwards, and became more concerned with creating their own content and building up their readership, and turning that into a business.

Conversation vs. viral

At Vox, co-founder Ezra Klein talks about something else that he thinks helped accelerate this transformation: namely, the rise of the social web, and platforms like Twitter and Facebook. In a market where the most important thing is to have your content “go viral,” he argues, there is less and less value in what blogs used to specialize in, which was a kind of multi-threaded, networked conversation (and the gradual decline in value of blog comments has arguably been a part of the same phenomenon).

“At this moment in the media, scale means social traffic. Links from other bloggers — the original currency of the blogosphere, and the one that drove its collaborative, conversational nature — just don’t deliver the numbers that Facebook does. But blogging is a conversation, and conversations don’t go viral. People share things their friends will understand, not things that you need to have read six other posts to understand.”

In a piece for The Daily Beast, another early blogger whose opinion I respect — Ana Marie Cox, the founding editor of the Gawker blog Wonkette — writes about Andrew’s decision as mostly being a stylistic choice, since he will presumably continue to write in other forms. She also says that she never really understood why there had to be a specific term for writing online. “A blog is a tool or a medium, it’s not a thing one does,” she says. In other words, it was just a term for a specific form or style of writing.

The voice of a person

I’m not sure I agree with Ana Marie, however. The blogs that I have always liked, and continue to like — like Jason’s or Andy’s or John Gruber‘s, or Union Square Ventures’ founder Fred Wilson’s blog, which is a classic of the genre — all conform to Dave Winer’s description of blogging as being “the unedited voice of a person.” That lack of a filter, and the back-and-forth with other bloggers that usually resulted, was what made blogging magic for me, and still does, even though it is much less common than it used to be.

But where I think Ana is right is that these elements of what we called blogging are all around us now, in a thousand different ways. When blogs first showed up, there was no other economical way to write and share your thoughts and hear from other writers or readers, but now they are everywhere. We can tweet and Snapchat and Instagram, and post things to Facebook or Google+ or Medium or dozens of other places. As she puts it:

“Today, the advantages and limitations that shaped blog writing into an even notionally recognizably form don’t exist. Blogging was once the fastest form of one-to-many publishing available; today, there’s a kaleidoscope of options: Facebook (which in the early days of blogging was still limited to people will specific .edu addresses), Instagram, Vine, Twitter, Snapchat, things the kids are using that I haven’t heard of.”

Blogging is everywhere

Clinging to a specific form like blogging is an anachronism, Ana argues — like wearing spats, or driving a Model T roadster when there is a perfectly good Porsche in the garage, or referring to driving as “Model T-ing.” And she has a point: publishing on Medium or Facebook is as easy as blogging ever was, and probably has the chance to reach orders of magnitude more people. Newspapers like the New York Timeshave done away with many of their blogs, and incorporated that content into the paper.

At the same time, though, I miss the days when you could reliably find the writing or thinking of a specific person in one place — their blog. And as I mentioned in a previous nostalgic look back at the “good old days,” one of the best parts of that era was that you owned your own real estate, rather than renting it from Facebook or Twitter or Medium. That’s why I enjoy movements like the Indie Web, which is trying to recover some of that, and the connectedness that the early blogosphere shared.

Ana is right that the spirit of blogging — the desire to share your thoughts or links or commentary with the world, in something approaching real time — lives on, and in fact is far more widespread and available than it ever was. And that’s undoubtedly a good thing (even if it has led to an alarming increase in noise). But it can’t stop old farts like me from getting a little misty-eyed when someone we admired decides it is time to hang up their blogging tools and put the Model T back in the garage.

]]>For many media companies, whether traditional or digital-only, the main focus is on the publishing of content — as much as possible, in most cases — and whatever social engagement there is with readers either takes place in a swamp of comments below a post, or is outsourced to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. In an age where social is becoming more important than search, that’s a very dangerous approach to take, says RebelMouse founder and former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry. And he has a point.

Berry says he left HuffPo and started RebelMouse because he saw what was possible in terms of combining content and community, but the barriers to actually getting there seemed almost insurmountable — especially for media startups — because there was no platform or content-management system that made that kind of thing easy. What most outlets use is what Berry calls a “Frankenstack” of cobbled-together pieces of technology.

“I saw this enormous gap between what people could do with content and social and what they were able to do — there was like this enormous canyon, and people had to climb down and swim across a river and then up the other side, and only one in a hundred could make it. Everyone thought all they needed was WordPress, but the amount of product and design and sysadmin even to just to build the site was overwhelming.”

A social-first CMS

What RebelMouse started with was a service that pulled in a user’s social graph from Twitter and Facebook and whatever other social sites they belonged to, and then made it easy to aggregate and display that. But that was never really the end goal, Berry says — building those tools and APIs gave RebelMouse what it needed to design and build a fully social content-management system or CMS for media companies and brands (which are increasingly becoming the same thing in many ways, at least in how they approach media).

The flagship example of what that allows, he said, is The Dodo — a site devoted to animals that was launched last year and is funded in part by Lerer Ventures, the investment arm of Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer (who is also a backer of RebelMouse and BuzzFeed). Unlike most media sites, The Dodo has no designers, no developers, no system administrators and no mobile team: that’s because RebelMouse powers the entire thing, including the apps, and gives editors all the various levers and analytics that come from its understanding of social content.

In addition to The Dodo, the company has also been building partnerships with more traditional media companies like Time Inc. and Viacom. For some, like MTV, Berry says RebelMouse just powers the social side of the company’s content — but in other cases it allows a media company like Time to experiment very quickly with verticals or online properties like The Snug, a site devoted to home decorating that is powered by RebelMouse and launched last year. More offerings like that are coming, says Berry.

The other big area of growth for RebelMouse has been with brands, such as General Electric, United and Samsung, Berry says. Thanks to the web and social media, brands have the same ability to become content creators and publishers that traditional media entities do (the recent State of the Union address being a good example) and RebelMouse handles all of the back-end and provides social tools and features that it would take those brands months or even years to build on their own.

Outsourcing to Facebook

But the thing that Berry says he is most excited about when it comes to the company’s partnership with media outlets like Time is that he believes RebelMouse can help those properties build or re-build a relationship with their most devoted readers — a relationship that many of them have effectively given up on, or outsourced to Twitter and Facebook, because managing it was just too difficult. And that is dangerous, he says:

“As media companies are growing their audience, their pages per visit and actual engagement is shrinking dramatically. They like to say we’re growing like crazy on Facebook, our unique visitors are up and it’s all mobile traffic — so it sounds like they’re hitting all the trends. But instead of a single pageview per visit, they’re getting like half a page view or a quarter pageview.”

One of the biggest factors in that change has been Facebook, Berry says — because unlike Google, which used to control how people found content, Facebook doesn’t want to send you away as quickly as possible, it wants to keep you on its site as much as possible, and get you to return as often as possible. And that makes it hard for media companies to build an engaged community of their own.

The River

That’s where a feature RebelMouse calls “The River” comes in: it effectively creates a social graph on top of the one that readers already have on Twitter and Facebook, but this separate graph is part of the media outlet’s website and app, instead of occurring somewhere else. So readers of The Dodo, for example, can connect Twitter and Facebook and follow the activity of their friends within the Dodo app — but they can also follow other readers, as well as writers and editors, and interact with them.

This might sound a lot like comments, which many sites either ignore or hand over to Facebook to manage, but Berry says there is a crucial difference, which is that only logged-in readers who choose to follow someone will see their comments. “That makes it a totally inhospitable environment for trolls,” the RebelMouse founder says. What it creates instead is a vertical social graph focused around the specific content of the site, which in turn increases engagement and community.

By using these tools — which also notify other users when someone they follow within the site or app posts a comment, shares a link or likes a post — The Dodo has seen time spent on the site more than double, Berry says, and other media partners are seeing the same kind of growth. More media partners will soon be implementing either the app features or modules on their site that have the same functionality, he says, but for now “this feels like a kind of next-generation of what comments could become.”

Could some vertical or niche media sites take back some of their community and social engagement from Facebook and Twitter by using RebelMouse’s tools? The company is still fairly young and its promise remains relatively untested, but Berry understands social like few other people (except possibly BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti), so it would be unwise to count him out.

]]>Until not that long ago, the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz — run in part by Netscape founder and serial tweeter Marc Andreessen — had virtually no investments in the media industry, apart from a token amount given to a couple of sites like Pando Daily. Now, the firm is one of the most active funders of alternative media companies, as it showed recently by leading a recent $50M round for BuzzFeed, as well as investments in Genius and the Imgur service. The latest to get some cash from the booming VC fund is Stack Exchange, a network of tech forums and communities that many non-nerds have likely never heard of before.

Stack Exchange’s best-known site, called Stack Overflow, was started by developers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood in 2008 as a kind of alternative to technical sites that charged for answers, and gradually built a following with geeks in much the same way that sites like Hacker News have. But Stack Overflow also became the hub of a growing network of sites, all built on the same platform, around topics as diverse as gardening and photography. As Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon put it in a post:

“Most likely, you’ve used Stack Exchange without even knowing it — the network had over 300M unique visitors last year. Many users come in through Google, get their answer, and then leave, usually a little bit smarter.”

The answer market

Even if there’s some overlap between the sites, pulling in 300 million unique visitors is nothing to sneeze at, and that number is growing according to Spolsky, who says in a blog post that Stack is now in the top 50 websites in the U.S. ranked by unique visitors, with traffic still growing at 25 percent per year. And the theoretical market for such a community or network of communities is large, Dixon believes — in effect, it’s the same market that knowledge-based sites like Wikipedia or Quora are targeting.

All of these services are trying to become the answer to Dixon’s question, which he calls one of the major startup opportunities of the information age: namely, now that more than two billion people have internet-connected devices, how do we create systems to efficiently share and store their collective knowledge? Many startups have tried to solve this problem, and many have failed, either because they get overtaken by spam or they just don’t provide enough value, or both.

“As far as I know, only two organizations have succeeded at scale: Stack Exchange and Wikipedia. Stack isn’t as large as Wikipedia on the readership side?—?the topics are more specialized—but, on the contributor side, is closely comparable to Wikipedia. Last year, Stack had… 3.8 million total registered users who contributed over 3.1M questions, 4.5M answers, 2.7M edits, and 17M comments.”

Quora and Wikipedia

It’s interesting that Dixon doesn’t mention Quora or Reddit, both of whom would probably like to think that they are also solving a similar problem of organizing the world’s information — although Spolsky has said that he doesn’t really see Quora as a competitor because it answers all kinds of questions, and Stack sites only accept questions that have a factual answer.

Stack also has a fairly robust business model, which is a career-related site attached to Stack Overflow — the theory being that if programmers and developers are talking about issues related to work, they are also likely to be looking for work. Over 6,000 companies have created brand pages on the career platform, where they can advertise openings to a motivated user base, and that generates two-thirds of the company’s revenue.

The network’s focus on answers that work for users also seems to have paid off in terms of Google ranking: if the question has a technical answer, it’s highly likely that a Stack site will be among the top results. And Dixon says the growth of the service has “reached escape velocity,” and it will continue to add new topics “until the network covers every topic that is amenable to objective Q&A.” Wikipedia and Quora may think that this is their department, but Andreessen seems to believe it belongs to Stack Exchange.

In addition to Andreessen Horowitz, other venture-capital firms involved in the financing round included existing investors Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and Index Ventures. The company has now raised a total of $70 million in four rounds.